Chapter 517: The Gradually Slipping Battle Situation

The battle erupted again without warning after the brief standoff.

The figures of both sides instantly crossed.

The black-robed wizard’s form “leaped” and appeared at Jie Ming’s flank. His palm, carrying that eerie power that directly defined “results,” pressed down silently.

A ruthless glint flashed in Jie Ming’s eyes. He neither dodged nor retreated; instead, he twisted his body and swung his arm, once again meeting it head-on with his newly grown right fist!

In that instant, the two sides clashed in the exact same posture as if the previous scene were replaying.

Puff—

The arm scattered at once, turning into flying ash.

Jie Ming activated the Great Void Step. His body shot backward like a golden cicada shedding its shell.

The black-robed wizard followed like a shadow. The second “result” manifested directly; the other palm was already nearly pressed against Jie Ming’s back.

Jie Ming’s left arm reflexively blocked behind him.

Puff—

The second newly grown arm met the same fate.

In the span of an instant, Jie Ming lost both arms once more. Yet through this brutal “tail-severing” tactic and the buffering of the Return to Ruins Armor, he once again opened a tiny gap in distance.

However, this time the black-robed wizard did not pause due to the load of employing the law as he had before!

His figure merely paused slightly. Then dark silver light flashed beneath his feet, and the entire person shot forward at a purely astonishing speed!

Although he did not use the [Imaginary] Law to directly erase the movement process, the straight-line speed he erupted with still locked tightly onto Jie Ming, who was executing the Great Void Step!

“As expected—” Jie Ming’s heart sank.

The worst situation he feared was unfolding.

Seeing that palm—which seemed capable of erasing all existence—once again breach space and claw toward his chest, Jie Ming’s expression turned even more vicious. His mind spun rapidly as he released the preparations he had made in advance!

Behind him, the air suddenly split open with ten dark vortices!

Ten pitch-black black giant priests, each holding a staff, instantly appeared between Jie Ming and the black-robed wizard!

The moment they emerged, the dark red gems at the tips of their staves simultaneously burst with blinding light!

Ten streams of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light, condensed like solid spears, shot from different angles toward the black-robed wizard who was mere inches away, sealing off every path of evasion and pursuit!

This strike was timed with vicious precision and at extreme closeness—practically point-blank!

“Hmph!”

A cold snort came from beneath the black-robed wizard’s hood.

The pursuing figure came to an abrupt halt.

Facing this concentrated fire attack capable of heavily wounding a sixth-ring, he merely glanced at it indifferently.

In the next instant, those ten sharp, peerless dark golden beams vanished silently the moment they entered the range around him, as if they had plunged into an absolute silent abyss of nothingness.

The [Imaginary] Law directly presented the result of “the attacks were perfectly intercepted.”

Jie Ming seized the fleeting opening created by sacrificing the ten black giant priests. He pushed the Great Void Step to its limit, his figure turning into a faint golden stream of light that nearly blended into the background, shooting backward several thousand meters!

At the same time, Jie Ming focused his attention on the black giant priests, attempting to recall them into his grotto-heaven through the soul contract link.

But his action was still a fraction too slow.

Or rather, the black-robed wizard’s counterattack was faster than he could “react.”

The black-robed wizard raised one hand and gently wiped it across the air toward the ten black giant priests who had just completed their attack.

The motion was gentle, like brushing dust off a painting.

The ten sixth-ring black giant priests, with their tenacious vitality and bodies covered in liquid metal, could not even utter a muffled groan.

Their forms disintegrated and dispersed in the same instant, silently crumbling like sand sculptures weathered for billions of years, turning into fine ash that scattered in the air.

Ten powerful sixth-ring combat forces were thus annihilated.

Jie Ming’s expression instantly turned extremely ugly—not only because of the loss of precious combat strength.

More importantly, from the opponent’s two consecutive, effortless transitions between offense and defense, he realized an even more brutal truth.

The opponent was gradually “familiarizing” himself with his defensive system!

The operation of the [Imaginary] Law was based on “what is theoretically possible.”

And this “theoretical” difficulty assessment was clearly closely tied to the caster’s depth of understanding of the target.

As the black-robed wizard continued clashing with Jie Ming, repeatedly “contacting” the Return to Ruins Armor and “sensing” its defensive principles and energy circulation patterns, his cognition of “how to break the Return to Ruins Armor” was deepening at an astonishing speed.

This meant that within the time, computational power, resources, and related “skip budget” the [Imaginary] Law could bypass, the proportion of budget he needed to expend to “achieve the result of breaking the Return to Ruins Armor” was rapidly decreasing!

The saved “budget” naturally allowed him to launch more attacks per unit of time.

Or, as before, to complete a high-intensity defense.

One side decreased as the other increased.

Jie Ming flexed his newly grown arms, which had just frantically wriggled out from the blood and flesh at his shoulders and were still somewhat pale and damp. His heart sank to the bottom.

He had originally thought that with the “adaptive evolution” brought by the Body Forging Method, he could gradually adapt to or even become immune to the opponent’s [Imaginary].

But now it seemed the situation was far from that optimistic.

His body might be able to evolve resistance to the [Imaginary] Law, but the Return to Ruins Armor itself was a fixed rune model and energy structure—it could not “evolve”!

As the battle dragged on, the opponent’s “familiarity” with the Return to Ruins Armor would grow higher and higher. The “budget” required to break it would become lower and lower. The attack frequency and variations would become faster and faster, increasingly unpredictable.

This was not a battle that could be won by dragging out attrition; it was a desperate situation destined to slide continuously toward the abyss as time passed!

On the other side, the black-robed wizard hovering in the void had his brows furrow imperceptibly beneath the hood.

In those two slaps that had scattered Jie Ming’s arms, he had clearly sensed a trace of “anomaly.”

The tactile sensation—or rather, the “resistance feedback” felt when the [Imaginary] power acted—had a clear difference from the previous times.

He believed that through the previous contacts he had already built sufficient “modeling” of this minor wizard’s physical strength, energy composition, and soul resilience. In theory, the “budget” required for subsequent destruction of the same body parts should steadily decrease.

But the fact was that in those two instances just now, the consumed “budget” had not decreased as expected!

What did this mean?

Unless—this kid’s body had undergone substantial strengthening or change during the gaps between his attacks, enough to interfere with the [Imaginary] Law’s assessment!

“Could it be—that this kid is rapidly evolving?!”

This thought flashed through the black-robed wizard’s mind like lightning, causing his dark-red pupils beneath the hood to contract sharply.

He was not unfamiliar with wizards or creatures possessing “adaptive evolution” or “combat growth” abilities.

But those existences either had high ranks and solid foundations, or their evolution speed was relatively slow, requiring prolonged battles or specific conditions to stimulate.

Yet this little guy who was clearly only fifth-ring had an evolution speed so fast that in the short intervals of a few attacks it could cause a perceptible deviation in his [Imaginary] Law’s “difficulty assessment”?!

This was simply unbelievable!

Connecting this to the opponent’s absurd regeneration speed, the bizarre domain that could block a single [Imaginary] strike, the impressive attacks, and those rather capable black elemental creatures—the black-robed wizard’s determination to kill grew even colder and firmer.

“What an—exaggerated genius that makes one uneasy,” he murmured inwardly, his killing intent condensing like substance. “In that case, I absolutely cannot let you live!”

Their gazes collided once more in the void, sparks flying.

A new round of offense and defense suddenly began!

The process seemed like a repeat of before: the black-robed wizard assaulted with [Imaginary] power; Jie Ming either sacrificed his arms to block or used the Return to Ruins Armor to buffer and maneuver, occasionally interfering and counterattacking with suddenly summoned black giant priests to buy a moment of respite and distance.

Yet Jie Ming’s expression grew increasingly grim with each exchange.

Although he had already adjusted the positioning and equipment level of the black giant priests within his grotto-heaven to minimize consumption per round as much as possible.

In every round of clash, he still had to pay the price of three to five black giant priests to barely escape the opponent’s lethal pursuit.

Jie Ming had no other choice. He could only exhaust himself to the utmost, adjusting the operation mode of the Body Forging Method based on feedback from each contact, guiding his body to accelerate evolution toward resisting the erosion of the [Imaginary] power.

He could clearly feel the Body Forging Method operating at overload. Every cell in his body was roaring as it adapted to the power that directly defined “results.”

With each regeneration, the bones of the new arms seemed a little denser. The arrangement of energy circulation seemed better at dispersing the erosion of that “dissipation” effect. The surface of the skin seemed to faintly develop an extremely pale spiritual glow of resistance against conceptual damage—

The body’s adaptive evolution was real and accelerating.

But the same problem remained: the Return to Ruins Armor could not evolve.

And the opponent’s “familiarity” with the Return to Ruins Armor seemed to be increasing faster than his body’s evolution!

The result was that with each attack, the “budget” needed to break the Return to Ruins Armor grew less and less. The saved “budget” made his attack transitions increasingly smooth and his variations more diverse.

Jie Ming’s bodily evolution barely offset part of the attack gains the opponent obtained from increased “familiarity,” but overall the situation was still irreversibly sliding in a direction extremely unfavorable to him.

To add insult to injury, as the battle continued, the energy and vitality consumption from repeated arm regeneration began to exert heavy pressure.

Even with his Spirit Transformation Stage cultivation and powerful physique, he started to feel waves of weakness and fatigue originating from the source of life.

The recovery speed of his internal Spiritual Qi gradually could not keep up with the consumption from high-intensity regeneration and maintaining the Great Void Step.

“Huff—huff—” Jie Ming’s breathing grew somewhat heavy.

Fortunately, he was not completely unprepared for this.

With a thought, deep within his grotto-heaven the “cross-spatial energy transmission system” tightly connected to the Incense Fire Divine Dao of the Infernal Sulfur plane had its operation mode instantly switched!

The pure elemental energy flow that had been stably transmitted to maintain the operation of the internal factories and replenish the element pools was temporarily cut off.

In its place, another pre-prepared channel with higher authority was forcibly opened!

Vast, pure, life-filled Spiritual Qi of Heaven and Earth surged like a bursting flood, crossing the endless void.

It poured grandly from the Infernal Sulfur plane through the Incense Fire Divine Dao network into Jie Ming’s grotto-heaven, then through the grotto-heaven’s conversion and guidance, madly flooding into his nearly dried-up meridians and qi sea!

Jie Ming’s body trembled slightly. Like a long-parched land meeting sweet rain, every cell greedily absorbed this purest energy that perfectly matched his immortal cultivation system.

His pale complexion visibly recovered its rosy hue. The depleted Spiritual Qi began to rise rapidly. Even the fatigue in his flesh was washed away by more than half under the nourishment of this pure Spiritual Qi.

However, the replenishment of Spiritual Qi only solved the “energy endurance” problem.

Even with infinite Spiritual Qi supply and his body accelerating in evolution.

According to Jie Ming’s calculations, before the black giant priests were completely exhausted, his body’s evolution degree would almost certainly not reach the qualitative threshold of “immunity to one attack effect of the [Imaginary] Law.”

In other words, when the black giant priests—the final “interference chips”—were used up, he would have to directly face a [Imaginary] wizard whose attack frequency and threat level had reached their peak.

That was almost equivalent to—a death sentence.